In our tenth year, I had to face the fact that we’d never actually built a $43.4 million charity. Charity: water reached that number in 2014 because a few big donors had had a really good year and decided to drop a lot of money in our laps. In reality, I’d built a $30 million organization, with about $13 million worth of surprises.
Thanks to our Well members, we’d figured out how to fund our overhead account. Thanks to Christoph and his team, to the Google Award, and to the work of countless partners, we’d made serious breakthroughs on sustainability in the field. But if we wanted charity: water to survive long term, I desperately needed to figure out how to fix our donation sustainability problem. We needed a monthly giving program—something like the Well, but for water projects.
Charity: water actually had a monthly program—of sorts. If you went to our website to make a donation, you could check a tiny box and “choose to give monthly.” Around 150 people a year had done that, but it didn’t add up to much, and we’d never put any promotion or strategic thinking into it. Worse, the people who did tick that box got nothing in return. No reporting on their wells, no thank-yous, no personal experience. We needed to start over and give them something much better. I didn’t know what that was yet, but the more I learned about other nonprofit monthly giving programs, the more I knew what I didn’t want ours to look like.
One day, I went online looking for inspiration and found a nonprofit that “sponsors” children in the developing world. After I answered some questions online and chose a child to sponsor, a checkout window popped up that read, “An item has been added to your basket.”
“What?” I said out loud. “An item? A child is not an item!”
This was a huge organization with seemingly infinite resources. As far as I knew, its membership program actually worked. And yet I couldn’t help but think that by billing the whole thing as a “shopping” experience, they were missing the point. You don’t tell donors that they’ve added a child to their “basket.” You say something like “Samuel is ready to join your family,” or “You have chosen to help Miriam.”
This is why I’d never felt connected to those traditional programs. I loved the idea of continuity, but I always wondered, Am I really helping this exact child? Does it really cost exactly $38 a month in perpetuity to meet all her needs?
And while child-sponsorship programs are pretty good about providing regular updates, most monthly giving programs are notoriously bad about it. Once you sign up, and your automatic payments start rolling in, you get ghosted. All communication ceases. Too many charities follow a “set it and forget it” model, where they hope that you won’t notice the money leaving your bank account for theirs, month after month.
I wanted us to do the exact opposite. Instead of ignoring our donors, we could intentionally remind them of their generosity. Regularly thank them. Recognize them. Tell them how grateful we were.
When I pitched the idea to Well members, they had a lot to say about monthly-revenue models. I learned that most of us have about ten different things we subscribe to (Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, HBO, Dropbox, newspapers, magazines), and of course we expect stuff in return for those subscriptions (music, entertainment, cloud storage, the latest headlines).
I certainly didn’t want to send our donors more stuff—a T-shirt, coffee mug, or tote bag. Instead, I had a better idea. And in May 2016, I shared it with our staff.
“People are already familiar with monthly subscriptions,” I said. “But we’re going to create a subscription program like no other. I want us to sign up a million people to give an average of $30 a month. And for your $30? You receive no tangible value in return.”
At first, I got a lot of blank stares. What is he talking about?
“In our program, 100 percent of the value of the donation is passed along to the people who really need it. And in return, we’ll inspire our donors!” I said. “We’ll give them exclusive content—stories from around the world of wells being drilled, biosand filters being constructed, women like Helen getting clean water and feeling beautiful for the first time. We’ll show our donors the impact they’re making month in and month out.”
Our team started to get excited about the possibilities.
“What if we highlight the seven members in North Dakota, and the seventeen in Illinois,” someone riffed, “and maybe, one day, we can connect them all.”
“Yeah. Let’s invite them all to New York for a summit! Kind of like Warren Buffett does for his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.”
“We can make videos just for them, introducing the new countries and local partners we’re working with. We can bring them closer to the people they’re helping.”
“I love these ideas,” I said. “We’ll build a community of generosity!”
For weeks, we debated what to call our community. “The Reservoir,” “the Village,” “the Harbor,” and “the Anchor” were just a few of the names floated around. I liked the triple entendre of “the Channel”—meaning water, a constant flow of information, and a place where our donors could “tune in” to the work. But in the end, we agreed on “The Spring.” It felt simple and uplifting. Spring signals a time of rebirth, of possibilities bubbling up.
We decided to launch The Spring on our tenth anniversary. To celebrate a decade’s worth of work and invite people in, we’d also make a short movie. I hired my old buddy Jason Russell, whom I’d met in Uganda ten years before on that first visit to Bobi Camp. Jason was a powerful storyteller, and had just started a new media company with his wife, Danica. Back in 2004, he and his friends had started a nonprofit called Invisible Children and traveled around Uganda with video cameras to create a groundswell of activism in America. Their work helped to enact legislation that aided Ugandans in their fight against warlord Joseph Kony.
In April, Jason and Danica and I spent weeks crafting a script that we hoped would move people to action. For several days, I was holed up in charity: water’s “Think Tank” conference room with Tyler Riewer, our brand and content lead, and Jamie Pent, our videographer, breaking down ideas and filling up the whiteboard in a scene straight from A Beautiful Mind. There were scribbles and arrows everywhere: This story could go here. We’ll move that part over there. Get rid of this.
We shared our outline with Jason and Danica. Then we debated, sweated the details, and merged our visions until we had a blueprint for The Spring’s launch: a twenty-minute video that told the charity: water story in one dramatic narrative. It would cost about $50,000 to make.
When I pitched the idea to our execs and staff, I got a lot of pushback. Our vision was too long, too expensive, totally unconventional, and totally unrealistic.
“Scott, a $50,000 video?” Gumbley complained.
“Nobody is going to watch a twenty-minute video,” Lauren said.
“They will if it’s good!” Jason and I argued back. Ten years in, I believed more than ever that people respond deeply to human stories. I once spoke at four services at a church in Miami, with almost no response from the crowd. The trip seemed like a total failure. Then, four years later, a $100,000 check arrived at charity: water from the estate of a man I’d never met. He’d heard me speak at that church and was so moved by the stories of people in need that he went home and changed his will.
Over the years, I’d seen people cry and give $1 million after a speech that was just an hour of me talking and clicking through a bunch of photos. I firmly believed that a $50,000 twenty-minute video was totally worth it.
But as our deadline approached, I started to panic.
“This film—it’s just not good yet,” I said to Jason two days before we were supposed to launch. “In fact, it’s really not good at all!”
“Scott, it’ll get there,” he said. “This is going to work.”
I wasn’t so sure. The Spring film and membership launch had to be perfect. This was our tenth anniversary; everyone was watching. The whole thing felt overwhelming. We had long nights, endless reshoots, and voice-over recording sessions that lasted until 2 a.m. At one point, Jamie and I went from office to office, microphones and laptops in hand, looking for a completely quiet space. After a while, we gave up and just recorded intermittently, whenever the HVAC unit cycled off.
Finally, after weeks of frantic work, we found the right pace and edits, and took the video from a B-minus to what felt like a solid A. Or, at least that’s what I hoped.
Before releasing it to the world, I sent the Spring video to friends and family.
“I’d love it if you could watch this with your kids, and let me know what you think,” I wrote to Dr. Gary and Susan Parker. Their son, Wesley, was nineteen now, and their daughter, Carys, was twenty-two. Would a couple of college students sit through a twenty-minute video for a charity? I wondered.
The next day, Susan wrote to say that they’d watched the whole thing. Afterward, Carys and Wesley were so moved that they’d jumped up and said, “We have to join The Spring! We’re joining right now.” Having Dr. Gary as one of our first members was a special honor for me. And the Parker kids signed up for their own memberships, independent of their parents.
“My children aren’t jaded, but they’ve seen a lot,” Susan said. “They grew up on a hospital ship in Africa, so the stories in The Spring aren’t new to them. Yet you’ve really caught their hearts.”
That’s when I knew this could be big.
On August 29, a week before our anniversary, we launched the video and The Spring monthly giving program. We splashed it across charity: water’s website home page, promoted it on all our social media channels, and sent emails to everyone we knew. We set a goal: one thousand new members to The Spring in one month.
Over those next few days, I got up constantly from my chair to check the digital dashboard on the wall outside my office. It was thrilling to see new sign-ups being recorded in real time. Our staff finally just moved the dashboard closer to my door, so I could turn around in my chair to look. Every couple of hours, they’d hear me yelling, “We got another one!” (I’m sure Ross would have lectured me about focusing too much on the small wins, but some things never change.)
By September 1, we really did have reason to celebrate. We’d brought on 1,099 new subscribers to The Spring, beating our goal. And that twenty-minute video that nobody was going to watch? It got 989,000 views on Facebook, and another 21,402 on YouTube. At the time of this writing, it’s at 2.5 million views and counting.
The Spring video is still the most successful piece of content we’ve ever created. The Spring membership has also grown, to more than 20,000 members from 94 countries. They give an average of $30 a month. And the community continues to grow each and every day. Thanks to The Spring, we can better plan our water programs around the world. We don’t have to start at zero every year. And we don’t have to have troubling conversations with partners in the field about commitments we cannot meet.
On September 7, 2016, the staff threw a small party at the office to celebrate charity: water’s tenth anniversary and the success of our Spring launch. But I missed it—I was at the hospital watching the birth of Emma Viktoria Harrison. She was the best birthday gift I’d ever received.
Before Vik and I had children, a friend said to me: Imagine you’re standing on an island, looking at water on all sides. You think that this little piece of real estate, which represents your capacity for love, is all there is. Then you have your first child, and a bubbling happens off in the distance and a giant new island appears. You realize that the new island was part of your heart all along, just submerged. And then you think you could never love another child like this one, but you look off to the left, and a brand-new island appears: your second child. And your heart expands even more. You’re not borrowing from or shutting down other parts to feel more love. It’s an additive process, like reclaiming land from the sea.
That’s how I felt after Emma was born: that I had more to give, more ability to love, more capacity to feel—and more pain over the fact that children were dying because of bad water. Letikiros and many others I’d met had made this real for me. Having Jackson and Emma strengthened my resolve that no child should ever have to drink dirty water.